dockers for linux

an overview of dockers available for the kde and linux

If you run KDE, you aren't just stuck with the standard "kicker" panel to operate as your app launcher and taskbar. There are a bunch of nice panel replacements that will spice up your desktop nicely. The ones that I've used and tested are kooldock, kxdocker and the nkotb kiba-dock (NB. the only place with anything useful on that site is the forum). So, what do these docks do, and what's cool about them?

kooldock

This one's been around for a while. It has basick functionality, and works well, however, when compared to the other two we're going to look at, it just doesn't that "wow" factor. It provides app launchers, and a taskbar. It will autohide, if that is required, and has a reasonable amount of configuration. You can drag and drop launcher icons from your kmenu, or manually add icons. It supports true translucency on a compiz/beryl desktop, which is nice and the animation is nice enough.

However, some of the drawbacks are that, if you set the zoomed icons to too large a value (I personally like to zoom from 48px to 128px), the zoomed icons become pixelated, which ruins the overall effect. However, zooming from 32px to 64px works just fine. I also find it annoying that icons that already have a launcher also appear in the taskbar section of the dock. For economy of space, it would seem sensible that the launcher button also become the taskbar button once launched. There is also no grouping of multi-window applications on the taskbar, so if you've got 5 firefox windows open, you get 5 firefox taskbar icons (plus the launcher icon if you've got firefox as a launcher button). One other criticism is that the text over the icons is not anti-aliased. I'm a bit of a stickler for nice looking fonts, and aliased fonts are a deal killer for me. Here's a video showing kooldock in action:

kiba-dock

kiba-dock has got all the kids talking. It is a dock much like the other docks referred to here, but is developed with xgl/aiglx in mind. But that's not the coolest part. The coolest part is that it has a physics engine built into it. The physics engine used is akamaru. Each icon has a physical presence and abides by the settings you provide for the physics engine. The icons bang together, and bounce off. When lifted up, they fall with gravity, and smash other icons out of the way as they fall. This is pure eyecandy. Here is a great video showing off the the cool tricks that kiba-dock can perform:

Other cool features of kiba-dock is that it provides previews of windows, icons act as a taskbar, you can also add icons using drag and drop from your applications menu. The physics engine, and appearance are also highly configurable from the "gset-kiba" configuration dialog. However, all this sounds too good to be true - why isn't kiba-dock on every desktop? Because it's very early alpha software and you need to compile it out of the svn repositories - or, if you use ubuntu, there are packages in trevino's repositories. If you are updating from svn, sometimes kiba-dock works really well, sometimes it does strange things, sometimes it just straight out segfaults. When you update from svn, you never know quite what you're going to get. The other issue is the physics engine itself. When you click on an icon, things bounce around, and the icons change order - so an icon is never in the same place. You can adjust this, so that they are in a "rope", like beads on a necklace. This means they don't change order, but it's not as much fun. kiba-dock shows a lot of promise, but if you don't have the patience for pre-alpha software, or don't like eye-candy for the sake of eye-candy, stay away.

kxdocker

kxdocker is one of my favourite projects. I've followed its development from it's first baby steps as a superkaramba theme, and seen it refined to be a very fast and powerful dock written in c++. Development of kxdocker has essentially stopped, as its developer Stefano works on a new version called QXDE, which will use the new QT4 libraries, as well as leverage off beryl. However, even though development has stopped, kxdocker is essentially feature complete, and very stable.

installation

You can download kxdocker from this downloads page. Your distro may have packages, but my recollection is that the kubuntu packages are incomplete. Therefore, you are better of compiling it (see here for a guide on compiling software). Make sure that you get the kxdocker package as well as the 5 packages labelled "Very Useful" - these are more than "very useful", they are essential. The kxdocker-taskmanager package is also important if you want taskmanager functionality. You should also pick up some of the plugins - the clock is very cool, and the battery plugin is also pretty cool if you use a laptop. One thing to remember is that kxdocker now requires some form of composition manager running on your desktop. This could be beryl, compiz, or good old kompmgr.

features

Some of the cool features of kxdocker are:

Parabolic zoom of icons;
Have multiple launchers grouped in one spot on the dock - switch between them using the mouse wheel;
Right click menu gives further launch and window management options;
Animations give visual feedback of actions (eg. launch animation, close animation, icon transaparent when minimized);
Autohide;
Auto-resize when new icons are added as part of the taskmanager;
Xinerama support (I've never tested it as I only have one monitor :(;
Everything is themeable from the main background to the backgrounds of text labels;
It's fast.

configuring things

You can drag and drop icons from your menu to add to the launchers. Then just right click on the icon to configure it (if necessary). There is also a configuration dialog which can be launched from the system tray icon. This allows you to configure all aspects of kxdocker, not just the icons themselves. This configuration dialog is a bit quirky, so have a little patience as you explore your way around it. Here's a video of kxdocker in action, so you can see how it runs - please don't judge the appearance completely from the video - my video capture has been playing up a bit, and there are some artifacts in there that don't appear when using it for real:

conclusion

For a featureful, stable and fast docker, kxdocker is the best available on linux, bar none (in my opinion). It can be a bit quirky to configure, but no more quirky than the others I've listed here. Whilst the others show promise, kooldock is just too limited when compared to kxdocker, and kiba-dock is just a bit too "out there" at this stage for my liking.

You can discuss this howto on the forums.